シング劇の農民

概要

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Synge's plays are explained as "peasant plays" by the playwright as well as his critics. When we examine his plays with our special attention on the peasants in them, they reveal a curiously unbalanced treatment of the peasants as against that of the tramps, beggars and tinkers. No peasant appears in The Tinker's Wedding or in The Well of the Saints. Farmers do appear in The Shadow of the Glen, but they are comic stock figures whose description by the playwright does not justify the play to be labelled "peasant play". The only play worthy of the epithet is Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, in which almost all are farmers or peasants of fairly just portrayal. The play is not, however, without problems. Old Mahon, "squatter", and Christy, "poet", are outsiders in the village of Mayo, and they play the same role to the villagers as tramps in the previous plays do. Although they act as catalyst for the liberation of Christy, the villagers remain, in general, passive and comic secondary personages. Synge's admiration for Irish peasants is not always embodied in the peasants in his plays where they are unfavourably opposed against the tramps who receive his heartfelt sympathy. Synge's plays are not necessarily what the playwright himself thinks to be.
大阪教育大学の論文